Not only is the poor man hopelessly out of touch with 21st-century Toronto, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. (Is it coincidence that three of city council’s most visible dinosaurs — Holyday and the Ford Brothers — all come from Etobicoke?)
Holyday became a laughingstock last week when he declared downtown a bad place to raise a family. His ignorance and anti-urban prejudice help explain why Toronto is fast falling behind other North American cities.
In fact, new research confirms what Holyday should have known — more families than ever do want to live downtown, and most of those who live in suburbs want their neighbourhoods to be more walkable, better connected to transit, more mixed-use, in short, more urban.
The report, prepared by the Pembina Institute and the Royal Bank, found an overwhelming majority of GTA residents would rather live in a city or a suburb with city-like attributes.
“This is not a city versus suburbs thing,” says Pembina’s Ontario policy director, Cherise Burda. “We surveyed GTA residents and found that if you held housing prices equal house, lot size and house size aren’t as important as walkability, access to transit and length of commute. They would give up the large house and yard in order to get those features.”
Even more revealing was the fact that given a choice, only 18 per cent said they’d opt to live in a traditional sprawl subdivision, what Burda calls a “car-dependent neighbourhood.”
Of course, once cost is factored into the equation; everything changes. Though most would prefer the city, they can only afford the suburbs.
“What’s missing,” Burda explains, “is affordable family-oriented housing in transit-oriented, mixed-use, walkable areas. This isn’t the case just downtown, but also in other communities in the GTA. It turns out that most people do want to live in dense neighbourhoods, not distant places. They don’t want any more of those sprawling greenfield developments. Government needs to do more to make it more attractive for developers to build compact, family-friendly homes. A lot of politicians are still encouraging developers to build sprawl.”
Look no further than York Region, which, desperately in debt, hopes to fast-track more of the sprawl that got it into trouble in the first place.
For Claude DeMone, RBC director of home equity financing strategy, the report “reinforces” what he’s already seeing.
“The interesting thing for us,” he says, “is that it validates how important a walkable community is not just in downtown Toronto but places like Mississauga, Markham and Whitby. Toronto is a great city to have kids, but lifestyle plays a huge role in where people live.”
As much as anything, the Pembina document, which will be released Monday, also highlights the growing gap between the inhabitants of the GTA and their elected leaders. While the population grows ever more urban-minded, politicians are stuck in a discredited past that has brought jurisdictions like York Region to the brink.
Given our leaders’ flimsy grasp on reality, it’s not hard to understand why we have not kept pace with the rest of the world. But clearly, people in the GTA have embraced the very changes the elected would either deny or stop.
But the forces of urbanization have been unleashed and there’s no looking back. Before they were elected, Holyday, the Fords and their antediluvian allies were merely relics; now they’re obstacles.
Original Article
Source: the star
Author: Christopher Hume
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